wallacoloo

i don’t know. the past decade has been everyone shouting about network effects, yet i can’t count on either hand the number of matching-related apps i’ve both left and joined over that duration. on the other hand, i’m still using basically the same http networking protocol during that same duration. network effects are real (hence http still dominating), but the higher you crawl up the stack the “softer” the effect.

say BTC rises from $30,000 to $300,000. two scenarios:

1. 10% of all BTC holders want to cash out. nobody lost their keys, so 2M BTC hit the “supply side” of the market.

2. 10% of all BTC holders want to cash out. half of them lost their keys, so only 1M BTC hit the supply side of the market.

this is the way it makes a difference. in the latter scenario, BTC spot price would likely reach a higher value.

sorry to come off as pedantic: it's not my intent. everyone has different experiences on Twitter, and this relates to an experience i don't have much of.

a _lot_ of people complain about "anonymous Twitter users", and i want to understand what they mean by that. i think it's the sort of "[anonymous] asshole slides into my timeline and then leaves" behavior. and if so, i suspect it's not actually identity or its form but _reputation_ that matters in these interactions: "non-reputable asshole slides into my timeline" (and so considering reputation becomes important in your interactions). but they could equally mean "this person could have multiple identities on this site and that doesn't work for me" (e.g. some person could be playing both a left-leaning and a right-leaning account and using those multiple identities to drive a wedge into some community), so maybe they really do want to avoid interacting with people who don't have a verifiably singular identity (this isn't easy).

i should have distilled it to that point: when a person says they don't deal with anonymous users, do they actually care about identity, or are they using identity as a proxy for reputation -- and reputation is the more direct concern?

i'd be really curious how the author approaches DMs. microblogging didn't make sense to me until i realized that the timeline can just be used as an approach to easily create surface-level connections, with the more fulfilling interactions happening in DMs (or more often, Matrix chatrooms, since i use ActivityPub instead of Twitter and in my corner Matrix is ubiquitous).

i’m frequently confused by people referring to “anonymous” accounts on Twitter. every Twitter user needs a handle, so it’s not really possible to use it anything less than pseudonymously AIUI.

by “anonymous”, do most people mean pseudonymous users who haven’t established an identity (i.e. few to no posts, or no bio, or egg avatar)? or do most people mean to capture all pseudonymous users under that “anonymous” label? (in which case, how does one evaluate if the user is pseudonymous or using their legal name? even blue-checks can be pseudonymous).

one usually hears the opposite argument: Bitcoin becomes more scarce as users lose their private keys. lost keys => smaller supply => higher price per unit. i can see the opposite argument though: lost keys => less desire to interact with bitcoin => lower demand => lower price per unit. so it might just be a wash.

Eth fell by about 10% relative to BTC pretty much immediately as the Terra/Luna stuff went south. yeah, there's absolutely connections between all the different currencies out there, but they're not equal strength. it's hard to draw good conclusions from price data just because there's so little of it. the last year's been stable with Eth:BTC confined to within 0.06 - 0.08. but zoom out just one more year and the range triples. over more meaningful durations, the different currencies show a lot less correlation.

> I’m also never going to rely on anything but .com because I don’t trust ICANN.

what's wrong with the other 2 of the "original 3" gLTDs: .net and .org?

i spent an afternoon digging into the ownership of all of this stuff, and .org felt like the safest option. .com and .net are more directly owned/operated by a US for-profit company (Verisign) who has complied with US requests to seize .com domains in the past. .org at least still has structural ties to a non-profit with chapters across the globe, even if it's incorporated in the US.

> Most world governments and taxing authorities work for their populace, they could be easily voted out if people saw what other nations are benefiting from such innovation.

you've got a lot of faith in "most world governments and taxing authorities". here in the US, i look at other countries who include in their tax statements a breakdown of where all your tax bill is going. that looks like a thing those other citizens benefit from, so please tell me: how can i vote this into effect here?

it's about the economics of mining _using an external source of capital_. the more significant interaction is not between the ASICs and the bitcoin rewards, but the companies and their investors. in that sense, it's more accurate to say it has "everything to do with public stock markets".

the author gives the oil analogy. the oil wells themselves have very similar economics to mining. it's the relationship between these similar operations and the investors which sets them apart more than the activity they're involved in.

modern day i expect to not have to turn off/on my receiver: it should wake on input and go into a standby state after so much inactivity.

hence my problem: i’ve got the Technics receiver + stereo speakers i inherited, but if you leave the receiver on for more than a couple days without explicitly venting it’ll cut out (even if it’s inactive: its idle power draw is incredible). that’s fine for me, but if i’m the only one who cares about audio, it’s a hassle for everyone else in the house to manually flip the rocker switch on as they use the tv and off when they’re done.

now i think about it, there’s probably some “smart outlet” i could get to make this transparent.

we used to have a phrase to remind each other not to give attention to the bad actors: “don’t feed the trolls” (doesn’t capture 100% of attention sinks, but it’s catchy, and a certain percentage of people understood that the phrase could apply more broadly). it occurred to me that i haven’t heard this phrase in several years now.

1) although federation enables any user to _contact_ any other user that's distinct from saying every user's _experience_ is the same everywhere. the ELI5 thing to point to is the "local timeline". although your "home timeline" will remain the same wherever you home your account, the "local timeline" is a way to see everything happening on your server without following each user individually. it's really akin to a "group" on more familiar social media, with the condition that you can only be in one of these groups at a time. for the instances below Dunbar's number, or maybe those above it which have a well-defined theme, the local timeline can be a really cozy place. it could be the primary way you interact with the system.

a longer explanation would mention the different _software_ each instance might run. you might interact with very different front-ends (how they present UI themes, render threads, notifications, etc). and backends have different support too (emoji-based post reactions; quote-replies/boosts; chat features/integrations). although there's _some_ tendency for the backend features to converge, they often converge only to the level of compatibility (a :100: emoji reaction from one server will show up as a flair-less 'like' on an server that doesn't want the full feature) and sometimes one region of the space _really doesn't want a specific feature_ (Mastodon.social famously is dead-set against quote boosts). your preferences will directly shape which feature set you desire, and it'll tend to land you in an area of peers that share these preferences (shaping your local timeline and also drawing a circle around some peers where you can be reasonably confident that "this area of the fediverse will grow in a way that keeps our instances well-connected").

it's a really organic thing. your original question could just as well be framed "if the thing works regardless of provider, why isn't everyone just _their own_ provider" instead of "why doesn't everyone use _the same single_ provider". right now the forces oppose both ends, and you get a decentralized (not distributed) fediverse.